Almost by definition, pretty much every family has a treasure trove of stories. The goal is to have as many good ones as possible. And I believe that for alternative families, the goal is to create the conditions to generate as many good ones as possible—to come up with traditions and rituals that form the glue that is really what family is all about. Here are some of the magic moments that the boys and I can point to and say, “This is who we are. This is us.”* 

(*With apologies to whatever network the similarly named show is on.)

Miss Kookamooka

Miss Kookamooka lives at the North Pole. She is Santa’s next-door neighbor. She travels the world teaching the cha-cha.

You might find this hard to believe, but for a long time my kids refused to believe that Miss Kookamooka was a real person. As evidence, they pointed to the fact that they never saw her, even though I claimed that she was a friend and used to visit me at the house often.

Kid: If Miss Kookamooka is real, how come she’s never here when we’re home?

Me: It’s not her fault you’re always away doing dumb stuff like school and activities when she comes to visit. And besides, she is very busy. It takes a lot of time to travel the world teaching the cha-cha.

I suppose it’s Miss Kookamooka’s fault that my kids also, for years, did not believe that there was a Queen of England.

Me: Your rooms and beds need to look better than that. What would the Queen of England say if she stopped by for a visit and saw those covers all over the place?

(Apparently, I am also friends with the capital-Q Queen, in addition to all the queens who I actually am friends with, who came to visit our house all the time.)

Anyhow: The Queen got her due when Uncle Cedric sent a postcard from London, and there was Liz in all her glory not only in the photo, but on the stamp.* Not to mention a few years later, when my kids voluntarily sat through Helen Mirren’s The Queen movie—twice. But that’s a story for later.

(*It’s amazing how much easier your kids will believe something when the information comes from someone who isn’t you.)

Mostly unrelated, but cute, tangent: One night at dinner, Mark said he wanted to go to London someday, because you never know, you could meet a “dutch and duchess.”

As it turns out, Miss Kookamooka had her moment as well, when we happened upon Santa’s Village in Tilden Park in Berkeley (yet another story for later). As we walked through the village, right next to Santa’s house, there was a snow-covered cottage. At the end of its lane stood a mailbox labeled “S.K.”

Shirley Kookamooka, Santa’s next-door neighbor. See you in cha-cha class.

Hike

Family lore is a combination of people (see “Miss Kookmooka”), rituals, and one-off experiences. These are the events that trigger an instant smile whenever someone starts with “Remember the time when . . . ?” Here’s one of ours.

Like most eight- or nine-year-olds, Daveon wasn’t exactly the best at keeping track of schedule changes. So it was that, one bright Thursday, we faithfully drove up into the hills to his Little League field at the regular practice time. Only to discover that practice had, clearly, been canceled. There wasn’t a soul in sight. I would say that I missed the memo, except I’m sure that the memo had been transmitted, verbally, to my son’s head. In other words, dead on arrival.

Being sort of a planner—less positively referred to as a control freak—I don’t always do so well when these kinds of situations arise (read: adult tantrum). But this time, instead of me ranting about poor communication, and the wasted drive, and what I could have used that time for instead, my guardian angel must have been in town. Because what I was actually inspired to say was:

Me: Hey, we’re up here now, and we have a free hour or so. Let’s go for a hike.

So we did. The field is in a big regional park, and the park is kind of amazing. It’s also a place that, after a dozen years living in the area, I had never explored in any depth. There’s a stone stairway that leads up to a stone-walled outdoor amphitheater, with a creek running downhill along either side of the stairs, ending in a fountain.* Starting at the fountain, we made our way up, seeing little lizards (salamanders?) and other cool such creatures in the rocks and water. I want to say frogs and/or turtles—but don’t quote me, I have a lousy memory.

(*I guess it would be weird if the creek ran uphill. Although that would up the cool factor at least 100 percent.)  

We detoured around the  amphitheater  and  made  our  way  to the top of the ridge. Up this high, the little critters were replaced by birds—lots of big, scary-looking, Alfred-Hitchcock’s-The-Birds birds. And then, at the very top, a young guy playing sax. Because when you’re on an unplanned hike, getting serenaded to Coltrane among the hawks comes with the price of admission.

After a few minutes listening to the performance, the boys and I started making our way down. After passing some kind of garden area, we saw—and hopped—a low stone wall. What magical place could this be? A rock garden, or another secret stairway? Um … neither.

As it turns out, we were now inside the amphitheater—the very empty, very locked amphitheater. The low wall we had just hopped was now a very high wall from the inside, with no grabbing places to climb back up. We wandered around for a good while testing all the doors and gates. Sure enough, we were locked in. So we did what any responsible, role-modeling father and his two impressionable sons would obviously do: We found a chain link fence, and hopped it.

Memo to prospective parents: If you’re ever planning to fence-hop with your kids to get out of a locked amphitheater, it’s way easier if there are two adults—one on the boosting side, and one on the catching side. It also helps if at least one of the adults—unlike me—has some sense of coordination or agility. Forewarned is forearmed.

We made our way back down the stone steps, passing more lizards, salamanders, maybe turtles and/or frogs. Final score: practice 0, control freak-ness 0, ticket for trespassing 0, adventure 1.

Bedtime Hits

For our first ten years or so, the boys and I read together every night at bedtime. It helped that I had a California king (since downsized to a queen),* and also that they were little-ish kid sized (since upsized to young men). We would clamber onto the bed and either I would read aloud, or we would take turns reading a page. The list of books we went through this way reads like a greatest hits of kids’ classics: a few Harry Potters, A Wrinkle in Time, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Hobbit, and on and on. It also included the creepy, vaguely Japanese one about a cat. Which Mark, especially, wanted to read over and over. I hated that cat.

(*Apparently, I’m going to sneak in as many queen references as I can in this book.)

As the boys got older, the nightly ritual changed to (more or less) weekly and moved to the living room. As much as possible, I tried to reserve Sunday nights for an early bedtime (for them—self-employed single parenthood and early bedtime do not go together) to allow for twenty minutes or so of shared reading—definitely taking turns at this point. We hit a couple of Shakespeares this way—all chosen by the kids, all tragedies. (Make of that what you will.) I’m pretty sure our last attempt was stumbling through American Gods by Neil Gaiman for a very, very long time. Free Sunday nights became increasingly hard to come by.

But one ritual that didn’t change while we were all under one roof was the nightly check-in. Most every night—again, clambering around on my bed in the early days, chatting in a more civilized manner in the living room later—we checked in about the day. Everyone shared a big feeling, we made sure we were all on the same page about tomorrow, and we said our prayers for folks in need and for anything we might want. This helped keep us grounded and aware of what was going on across our increasingly independently active lives.

But back to the bed-clambering phase. Somewhere in those years, for a period of about a year—this must have been when I was taking in a lot of caffeine—these nightly check-ins had a special bonus feature. Whenever one of the boys said something that reminded me of a song lyric, I would burst into said song. Examples:

Son: Remember when . . .

Me:  REMEMBER!      REMEMBER!      REMEMBER!

REMEMBER! Remember my name . . . Fame!

Son (most likely during a tickling session): Daddy, stop!

Me: . . . In the name of love, before you break my heart, think it o–wo–ver.

Son (this one more of a wrestling session): Daddy, let go!

Me: I like the night life, bay-bay! She said . . . let’s go!

 Etc.

These outbursts became known as our bedtime hits. Being me, I set out to capture all of them on CD. We ended up with eight volumes’ worth (289 songs, 175 hours). Let’s just say, iTunes loves me—as did many of the local independent record stores, as I sought out and found old CDs with some of the more obscure tunes. Legally downloading the theme song from H.R. Pufnstuf wasn’t much of an option in 2004.

It’s a pretty impressive collection, if I do say so myself. Show tunes, old R&B, some hip-hop, lots of schlock hits of the 1970s. (I’ll ignore what this says about my upbringing.) And maybe my favorite, a la Sesame Street: “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake.”

I’ve long since forgotten what most of the lyrical triggers were for most of the songs, and the kids have long since lost interest in the bedtime hits—nothing they are playing on cool stations, let alone Spotify. But I like to think that someday, when we are gathered for a holiday or some such, one of them—or who knows, maybe one of their kids—will be rifling through Dad/Granddad’s old CDs, and the “Bedtime Hits” title will strike them such that they will pop it in for old times’ sake, or curiosity, or both.

And then we will be able to “REMEMBER! REMEMBER! REMEMBER! REMEMBER!” the old days, when they were small enough for all of us to fit on Dad’s bed.

Christmas at Tilden

Of all the magical stories, this one is hard to top for its magic-ness.

It was a Friday afternoon in December—the afternoon of the kids’ last day of school before the winter break, if I remember right (always a risky proposition). My not-yet-ex gave me this Christmas gift: He took off for a weekend in Seattle with his ex—without bothering to tell me until he was already on his way to the airport.*

(*He was very generous with these kinds of gifts. More on him later.)

I was not in a very good mood.

To my credit, I didn’t do what I usually did in those situations: sit and stew. Instead, I decided to go for a drive with the kids—nowhere special, just get out and ride around. For good measure, I invited a family friend along.

We tooled around for a while, and then one of us—well, one of the adults, it wouldn’t have been the boys—suggested we head up to Tilden. Tilden is an enormous regional park in the Berkeley Hills that houses a lake, a steam train, pony rides, and other outdoor attractions nestled among redwoods, eucalyptus, and evergreens. It wasn’t exactly a destination on a December Friday at 5 p.m.—by which point night had fallen—but it was as good as any for a no-particular-place-to-go distraction drive.

We headed up through North Berkeley—which isn’t normally how I would go up to Tilden, but that’s how magic works—and started heading down the windy, steep road to the lake at the bottom of the canyon. About three-quarters of the way down, we found ourselves in a short line of cars, which seemed unusual given the time and location. And then, at the end of the road, we saw it.

At that intersection, the turn to the lake is to the right. But immediately to the left, there is the Tilden Park carousel. As carousels go, there isn’t much to say about it, other than that I believe it’s really old. But that night . . . well, let’s just say we didn’t make the right to the lake. We instead made the left, straight to Santa’s village.

“Impressive” doesn’t even begin to cover it. For the boys, “mind-blowing” might be closer to home. The carousel itself was covered in lights, as was its enclosure, as was the enormous pine tree just outside. How they got the lights up the forty- or fifty-foot height—all I can say is, that’s one long ladder. Inside the octagon-shaped enclosure, all around the edges, were small Christmas trees covered in ornaments for sale. Each had a different theme: trains, musical instruments, plush animals, even one with UC Berkeley items.

We all took a spin or two on the merry-go-round, and the kids and I picked out an ornament each, for one of our other family rituals. Each year after our first instant-Christmas visit that I described earlier, I had the kids pick out a new ornament for the tree. My idea was that when they ventured out on their own, they could take their ornament set with them to start building their own trees.

I tried to go somewhere unique each time. I know one year we bought them in Victoria, British Columbia (more on that trip later), and I feel like another year it was in Sacramento. Given that I didn’t know that the Tilden North Pole existed, the fact that we hadn’t bought that year’s ornaments—and that this crazy variety was available for sale—was the icing on the cake of the experience.

Meanwhile, back at the village: Next to the carousel was a booth selling seasonally appropriate food such as popcorn, cider, and hot chocolate. Between that and the big tree was Santa’s home, featuring occasional visits from the jolly man himself. Unfortunately, he was out bowling or something when we were there.

Across the walkway from that was a full assembly of lit homes, walkways, a few reindeer. I even vaguely remember a geographically confused penguin. Not to mention proof that Miss (Shirley) Kookamooka is real, which might have been the sweetest treat of all—at least for Dad.

All very magical, all completely unplanned. As we were leaving, we saw that the line of cars to get in was now stretched at least fifty long up the hill—so our timing was perfect as well. The exclamation point to our surprise visit to the North Pole.

Similar to our unplanned hike, the message was clear: Make stuff up. Follow your gut (or the wrong path through North Berkeley). If you can let loose once in a while, magic is waiting for you and your kids, just around the corner.

Movie Night

Of all of our traditions and rituals, probably the most consistent and longest-lasting one was movie night. Sure, we read the heck out of Harry Potter. But our capacity for watching Harry Potter? We’re talking Quidditch World Cup here, folks.

In its early version, movie night looked like this: During the week, I would order a movie and a cartoon from Netflix—back when “Netflix” meant “mail.” On Saturday night—and I mean, faithfully, every Saturday night—we would order a pepperoni pizza (which Mark faithfully took the meat off of—I’ll get to food later) for delivery and then sit and watch our cartoon and movies while eating. The kids had a say in the movie, but I got to pick the cartoon. They watched enough of their own cartoons on the regular, and besides, this gave me a great opportunity to introduce them to the wonders of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Josie and the Pussycats.

It wasn’t all routine at this point. Sometimes we changed which pizza place we called, and sometimes we threw in a dessert. (For the record, we’re not a big dessert family, which is why the kids’ dentist loved us.)

Mark at one point declared movie night his favorite thing about us being a family. I’m not sure what that says about the other 164 hours in the week, but it was nice to know that at least I scored with this idea.

Over the years, new variations came along. At some point, we started rotating the movie and cartoon selection, so that each of us took turns making that week’s picks. At an even later point—probably when I realized that the kids weren’t going to want to watch anything I picked for them—I dropped out of the rotation, and the kids took turns making picks on alternate weeks.

The menu varied up as well. We first added make-your-own tacos on alternating weeks with the pizza—my least favorite, because it involved the most prep and cooking. Later, we added a third option called “freezer food,” which basically involved mini pizzas, mini hot dogs, mozzarella sticks, pierogis—all that healthy stuff. Which I loved, because I could basically just spill everything out onto a cookie sheet and pop it in the oven. Because I am lazy, I’m pretty sure we alternated pizza – tacos – pizza – freezer food – pizza, etc. This meant I could double up on the nights where my only jobs involved pulling out paper plates, paying the delivery person, and helping myself to Mark’s discarded  pepperoni.

As you might imagine, we watched a lot—a lot—of dumb kid movies over the years. I think Jackie Chan is a hoot, but boy, has he made some terrible movies. Because my kids are cool, we also watched a whole bunch of musicals. We also watched The Queen, as well as a fair share of stuff that was either funny or charming or quirky or some combination of the above.

Unfortunately, my kids decided they needed to grow up right around the time I decided single Dad should have a social life. So movie nights became pretty rare occasions around here. Somehow it always seemed to be Mark’s pick, and aside from the occasional Pitch Perfect, we spent most of the time watching things blow up. Cartoons went by the wayside a while back. After exposing (or inflicting, depending on your point of view) so many of my childhood Saturday morning favorites on them—everything from H.R. Pufnstuf to The Bugaloos—about the only thing we could agree on was Scooby-Doo. For all of its inherent grooviness, Scooby-Doo loses some of its appeal when you’ve seen every episode so many times that you remember who the ghost is before the opening song is over.

Plus, when Daveon’s no-gluten/no-dairy/no-anything-that-vaguely-resembled-anything-Dad-didn’t-need-to-cook diet restrictions kicked in, pizza and freezer foods were off the menu. Oh well, there were always tacos . . .

Next Chapter: The Village